amyis

Write a strong personal statement, an addendum explaining your LSAT (it's not terrible BTW), and get great reference letters.

Numbers are a part of the majority of their consideration for acceptance, but note that there will always be exceptions for compelling applicants.

Part of being a lawyer is power of persuasion and ability to present a position. If your position is that "I'm awesome and you want me in your school" make it persuasive, articulate and ultimately, convincing.

I personally know of a guy that scored in the 25% on the LSAT... that's right, twenty-fifth percentile.... and still got in to Osgoode Law, one of the top law schools in North America.

Don't take the nay-saying number geeks advice as 100% accurate. (I suspect many of them would have made better accountants.)

Write a strong personal statement, an addendum explaining your LSAT (it's not terrible BTW), and get great reference letters.

Numbers are a part of the majority of their consideration for acceptance, but note that there will always be exceptions for compelling applicants.

To the original poster: I don't mean any disrespect to amyis... or at least not MUCH disrespect, but I would ignore her advice entirely. The schools you listed are very competitive for admission and get many more applicants than slots. They do NOT go through each application with a fine tooth comb. I'm not aware of any school that does. They make their first cut based on numbers alone and chances are you'll be culled in that first cut.

I have no idea what goes on in Canadian Law school admissions. Maybe what amy says is true north of the border.

However, it is astoundingly stupid advice down here in the US. The overwhelming odds are that your app will be in the reject pile and unless you are a URM, nobody will ever take a second look at it.

Generally speaking, when dealing with far more applicants than slots, people who make decisions make fast classifications into "automatic yes", "strong candidate", "borderline candidate" and "automatic reject" piles. In LS admissions, unless you check a URM box, these initial determinations are made based on numbers, alone. Even with URMs, they're PROBABLY made on numbers alone, just according to a different curve. (And admissions committees will never make any record of how they make URM admissions decisions, lest they run afoul of Grutter v. Bollinger. The only way Affirmative Action passes constitutional muster is basically for the schools to refuse to document any of their decision criteria when weighing URM admissions.)

If you get into that auto reject pile, game over. Your personal statement isn't worth the paper it's written on if you got cut early on. Might be a factor if you're one of the borderline candidates, but if you're not, it's meaningless.

Frankly reference letters are almost never worth anything. Really. All they prove is that you are a homo sapien who has been around other homo sapiens. Unless it's from the Nobel Prize committee or something equally improbable, an LOR from a part-time employer or a college prof is really a big fat nothing. I mean, it MIGHT and I emphasize MIGHT matter if there is exactly one other slot left and all other factors are equal. However, any person who can't get 2 or 3 people to claim that they are humanity's best intellectual hope is just not a person who is going to apply to a top law school, anyway.